Chillerama (2011) [REVIEW]

Anthology? More like MAN-thology, am I right?! Because all of the writers/directors were guys? Ugh, whatever, that was terrible. At least there’s finally a film that combines the talents of Adam Green, Joe Lynch, Adam Rifkin, and Tim Sullivan! Also known as the director of Hatchet/Frozen, director of Wrong Turn 2, writer of Underdog, and director of 2001 Maniacs! Oh, you guys don’t really care that these people got together? Well, neither did I. Other than Adam Green, who I really want to like but have a hard time doing, I didn’t know who any of these other people were. When this popped up on Netflix Instant, I figured I’d give it a shot. Normally when I review anthologies, I just lump the whole thing together and give it one moon rating, but this time you guys are getting moon ratings for each segment, AND one at the end! TECHNOLOGY!

Wadzilla

When a man has a hard time getting his wife pregnant, his doctor prescribes him some medicine that is supposed to make his sperm stronger. Rather than making each individual sperm strong, the medicine results in just one super sperm being created each time this guy got a boner. They get progressively bigger and seem to grow larger on their own, even after escaping the man’s body, to the point that one giant monster sperm wreaks havoc on the town. The sperm tries to impregnate the Statue of Liberty, which is when the army corners it and makes it explode cum everywhere. This was a strong, funny start to the movie, and it was able to switch back and forth between a gross out comedy with exploding cum-like material hitting all the actors in the faces while also mocking sci-fi movies from the 50’s. If only Underdog was this disgusting and funny!

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I was a Teenage Werebear

We’ve heard of werewolves, so this is probably about someone who turns into a bear and kills people, right? Well, kind of. This was part musical and part 60’s surf movie, with the idea of someone turning into a bear thrown in. Rather than it being a grizzly or polar bear, the werebears in this film turn into gay bears. Part bear, part homosexuals who are large, fat, and hairy. Other than the fact that this kept happening, I can’t think of what the fuck this movie was about, except I guess also idea of physical changes in someone’s body being manifested into a horror movie. Remember how in Carrie, when Sissy Spacek got her period, she got super mental powers? Or that in most werewolf movies, once a month someone turns into a crazy monster, like when girls get mad when they are PMS-ing? I understood that this was what Tim Sullivan was going for, and he wanted to (possibly) represent a boy going through puberty to realize he was a “monster” for being attracted to other guys. The point just seemed lost in the silly surfer musical parody and nothing was really funny or entertaining enough to justify it being made…at all. Really the weakest segment of the entire movie, and brought the high hopes that Wadzilla set all the way down and into the gutters. I realize now that pointing out that the one segment made by an openly homosexual filmmaker just after I commended how entertaining a low-brow short film called “Wadzilla” can be viewed negatively, and I accept any sort of hammer judgement that my gay readers would like to smash me with. Maybe some will say I didn’t “get it”, or say I’m trying to bash a gay filmmaker solely because of his sexual orientation, but I didn’t enjoy the segment for a plethora of reasons, whereas I felt Wadzilla kept in line with the overall tone of this anthology.

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Diary of Anne Frankenstein

Even the name itself is funny! This segment starts with the discovery of the Frank family by Nazis, when Hitler himself breaks through a wall to steal the Frank family diary. Once he leaves, he takes that diary back to his laboratory to build a zombie made from the body parts of Jewish people, which now that I type it, seems a lot more offensive than I originally thought. Once reanimated, the monster wears a yarmulke and wears one of those scarves that Jewish guys wear, and Hitler tries to train it to do his bidding. It was ridiculous, offensive, silly, and a lot of fun. The best part was that Joel Moore, who played Hitler, as well as played robot legs from Grandma’s Boy, doesn’t know any German. That means any time he was speaking German, he was just making up gibberish. For the record, Rampaige picked up on this before I did, and she was very proud of herself for noticing…AS SHE SHOULD!

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Zom-B-Movie

See what they did there? The title of this segment is the story that pulls all of these movies together, and is not only a play on the word “zombie”, but also a play on the idea of “B Movies”! SO CLEVER! This story, which we see in five to ten minute increments, involves a group of friends attending a screening at a drive-in movie theater where the owner screens his favorite films. Those films? Wadzilla, I was a Teenage Werebear, and Diary of Anne Frankenstein! Whoa! The plot involves a guy digging up his wife’s corpse to jerk off onto her face, when she rips his balls off and I guess infects him with something? He goes to the drive-in and starts infecting more and more people as the film goes on. These zombies don’t just eat brains, but they also eat cock and pussy! In the sense that they are horny monster things that are killing and fucking and fucking and killing EVERYTHING. The actors weren’t particularly all that good, but there were funny enough references to other movies and good enough special effects to make up for the poor acting and dialogue.

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In case you’ve seen this movie before, you might notice I left out one of the films, titled “Deathication”. It involved lots of poop splatters going batshit crazy everywhere, but only lasted a couple of minutes before the final act of Zom-B-Movie took over. Even though none of the segments got a particularly high rating, I wanted to give the movie as a whole the 3/4 moon rating. All of the segments were fun and really in the spirit of paying homage to B movies that would play at drive-ins. In addition to all the segments being entertaining, the story that tied them all together was also entertaining, which is what most anthology films lack. You might get SOME story that connects everything, but a lot of times it might just be one segment fading to black, and then the next segment fades in and you see the title. The whole thing was a lot of fun and would definitely be a good movie to pop in with your friends. The only thing preventing this movie from getting the better rating is the Werebear movie. Maybe I didn’t get it, maybe you guys will say I hate gay people, but it really felt out of place and seemed to be included mostly as a favor from the other people involved. If there was a way to watch this movie without that segment, I’d be all for it, but instead, the filmmakers will have to deal with the rating they’ve been handed. I’m sure they’ll lose sleep over it.